


Fire and Ice

by hopeh_wa



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-28 15:39:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeh_wa/pseuds/hopeh_wa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slight AU. A different take on the AtLA universe in which the Avatar is not Aang, but Zuko, who must struggle with his family background and his newfound destiny as he turns sixteen. Eventual Zutara, but with focus on most other pairings, too. The title is subject to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Patrol

Air. Water. Earth. Fire.

My grandmother used to tell me stories about the old days, when the Avatar kept balance between the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads. But that all changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar mastered all four elements; only he could stop the ruthless firebenders. But when the world needed him most, he vanished. One hundred years passed, and during that time three more Avatars passed through the world, but none of them ever mastered the cycle of elements; all three were ruthlessly destroyed. The Fire Nation is nearing victory in the war. Two years ago, my father and the men of my tribe journeyed to the Earth Kingdom to help fight against the Fire Nation, leaving me and my brother to look after our tribe. Some people believe that the Avatar was never reborn into the Fire Nation, and that the cycle is broken. But I haven’t lost hope. I still believe that, somehow, the Avatar will return to save the world.

\---

“This place is a wasteland.”

“I do not think so, Prince Zuko. There is really quite a bit more out here than meets the eye.”

“Uncle, there is literally nothing here! It’s all snow and ice! There’s no Avatar here; there aren’t even any people here!”

“But, you must admit, it is all a rather stunning view. The South Pole is beautiful perhaps because there has been so little human interference here.”

The young firebender glared at his uncle who was, in his own opinion, being infuriating simply for the sake of it, but chose not to respond. Instead, he simply muttered under his breath a bit, and snippets of phrases like, “Can’t believe this…” and “banished to the middle of nowhere…” were audible, but he stuck his good eye to his spyglass and chose to pretend as though the conversation hadn’t taken place at all.

Iroh, the boy’s uncle, looked his nephew up and down before sighing, then folded his hands placidly to rest on top of his rather overlarge stomach. “Happy birthday, my nephew,” he said after a few more moments of near-silence.

Zuko looked away from the spyglass, his features softening for the first time that day. “…Thank you, Uncle.” He bowed slightly, unsure of what else to say. He knew he was rather impatient, even somewhat rude, with his uncle, but the man never seemed at all aggravated by it. Instead, he did things like remember Zuko’s birthday even when no one else on the planet did. Even when he was stuck out in this frozen wasteland with no contact from any family member, for what was sure to be the third consecutive birthday of no consequence. Without realizing it, his features hardened back into another scowl. “It’s just not much of a birthday when I’m here, out in this place feeling useless, instead of searching somewhere back home, where I might actually have a chance at finding the Avatar. I can’t find him here. I’ll never get my honor back on these stupid ‘patrol duties.’”

“You know, destiny is a funny thing, Prince Zuko. Perhaps this birthday of yours will bring more changes than you think.”

“Yeah, well, the only change I want to see is on that horizon. I want to see my home again, my family. I want my honor back.”

As much as he cared for his uncle, he didn’t wish to hear any more of his sage-like advice for the moment, so he gave another respectful bow to the man, then turned on his heel and headed back to his quarters onboard the ship. Perhaps his uncle would think he was resting. But out here, patrolling these icy South Pole seas on this run-down ship with no hope of returning home, he never felt particularly rested.

\---

A few hours later, Prince Zuko got his wish—but only partially. The horizon did indeed change, but only physically so. The change wasn’t particularly beneficial to the ship or its residents; the sky darkened, the winds picked up to a dangerous level, and the waves underneath them became choppy, reflecting the same iron-gray of the sky, the ship, and the young prince’s mood. It certainly wasn’t the change he’d been hoping for, in any case, and when he walked back out on deck, it was while wearing a scowl to match the low-hanging clouds.

“It appears as though we are in for quite a rough storm,” Iroh observed.

“Our ship has been through worse than this before. We can last it out.” Although he didn’t state it out loud, it was clear that Zuko’s meaning was that the ship had better last it out. Or else.

He’d had enough of things not going his way. It was about time karmic retribution found someone else to dump on.

From the look on his uncle’s face, however, he gathered there was more to it. Eyes narrowing suspiciously, he asked, “Why do you look so worried about this storm?”

The older man sighed, apparently reluctant to be the bearer of bad news. Better him than one of the crew, though. Everyone onboard knew that Prince Zuko was far less likely to threaten to throw his esteemed uncle off the ship rather than some minor and unimportant crew member. “Well, you see…please, try not to overreact, Prince Zuko—”

“I’m not going to overreact, Uncle! You’ve already told me that that’s not what future leaders do.”  
“Alright, then. The crew recently discovered a…leakage on the ship.”

“What?!” As Iroh had feared, his nephew took the news badly. Flames momentarily erupted out of his balled fists and smoke issued from his nostrils. As per usual, he still was not quite ready to repress his frustration and impatience when receiving news he didn’t wish to hear. “That’s not possible!” he snapped. “What else are the maintenance crew for?!”

Iroh winced. “Yes, er, the thing is, Prince Zuko, you haven’t allowed the crew to pull into port for a long time now. The crew hasn’t been able to examine the ship in full detail while we are always sailing, and apparently there was a rust build-up. The rust wasn’t caught in time and…we now have a leak.”

“Well, have them fix it!”

“I am afraid we cannot on such short notice. And we are too far away from the nearest Fire Nation naval facility; the leak would do too much damage before we even arrived. If you want the ship repaired, Prince Zuko, I am afraid we must seek shelter elsewhere. We cannot hope to even weather this storm with the ship in such a condition.”

Zuko snarled, fire once again momentarily rising up from his fists. It subsided as he turned his back on his uncle, moving to stand in front of the ship’s telescope and focusing it on that seemingly endless, bleak expanse of ice. He was silent for a few long moments, peering through the glass intently with his good eye. Finally, he walked away from it, turning a stern gaze back onto his uncle.

“Well,” he said, “I think I found us some shelter.”


	2. The Southern Water Tribe

“This fish better not be poisonous!”

“Sokka, why on earth would the fish be poisoned? You know that I caught it with waterbending, not a fishhook covered in acid.”

“Hey, don’t expect me to understand your mystic magic water mumbo-jumbo! All I’m saying is, if that fish suddenly starts wiggling around in my belly or something, you’re never coming fishing with me again.”

Katara glared at her brother, who seemed to be particularly bent on infuriating her today.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t wanted her to come along in the first place; she’d had to beg and plead with her grandmother to make Sokka finally let her tag along on his fishing chores so she could see if she might be able to help. She’d even finished all her other chores two hours in advance simply to ensure that she’d have some free time to spend with her brother instead. Fishing had always seemed more interesting than her own chores ever did, but duties were mostly divvied up in the southern water tribe according to sex.

All the women and girls of her tribe were in charge of cleaning, cooking, looking after the young children, mending clothes, and generally maintaining some sense of order. What was more, Katara herself was the granddaughter of Kanna, the village elder, and so had even more chores heaped upon her plate than she would have otherwise, like midwifing. Boys—or young men, in the case of her brother—were in charge of the safety of the village. However, considering the average age of most of the boys was about five years old, there wasn’t honestly much they could do, except run around knocking down her older brother’s ice forts and take the occasional potty break.

For the longest time, all Katara had wanted was equal treatment; she wanted her grandmother to let her accompany Sokka on one of his fishing trips. Now that she had finally gotten her wish, however, she was starting to regret ever having asked.

Sokka had whined almost non-stop when their grandmother had finally given the okay, protesting that Katara, as both a girl and the last remaining waterbender of the South Pole, would only scare the fish away, tip the canoe over, or otherwise screw things up. His protests had been overridden, but that hadn’t stopped him from grumbling and making the experience—which Katara now had to admit was a lot more boring than she’d expected, from the way Sokka talked about fishing and hunting during suppertimes back in the village—much less enjoyable. They had bickered back and forth the entire time, and were it not for her, they wouldn’t have a fish at all. In fact, Sokka had nearly lost them their only catch, his spear nearly bursting the water with which she’d caught a particularly fat crocodile fish. After that narrow miss, he had spent the entire remainder of their time muttering sexist remarks more audibly than ever and sulking when it became apparent that Katara, and not himself, had been the breadwinner of the day.

“Waterbending isn’t magic, Sokka,” she finally said, crossing her arms out of exasperation. The only reason her hands were free anyway was because Sokka had insisted on carrying the fish in its basket back to the village, simply so that he could feel somewhat useful. She’d relented, for the sake of his pride if nothing else. “It’s a spiritual exercise and connection shared between a person and their specific element—”

“Spiritual exercises sound plenty like magic to me! Either way, just keep your…your spiritual water magic off my fish when I’m eating it.”

Katara arched an eyebrow. “I’m sorry, whose fish?” she asked.

She kept trudging through the snow a few more paces before realizing that Sokka wasn’t responding. It was unusual for Sokka to not have some sarcastic quip, or even a lame response, not when they’d already been arguing all day long. Generally, Sokka was almost as stubborn as she was. He didn’t just give up without a fight.

She sighed and turned around to ask him what was the matter, but at the look on his face she realized that whatever it was, it was no laughing matter. He was squinting into the distance, the muscles in his arms suddenly straining despite the fact that the fish and the basket were both relatively light. For the first time since they were both children, she realized that he didn’t appear smug, grumpy, or mildly amused. He looked scared.

“Sokka…?”  
“Fire Nation,” he whispered, not having heard her.

And suddenly, he dropped the basket and ran full-speed in the direction of their village, leaving the single fish lying lifelessly in the snow.

“Sokka!”

\---

He didn’t know what was happening. He simply saw the outline of the Fire Navy ship, and he ran. That outline never had been, never could be, a good omen. All it had brought to the southern water tribe thus far was destruction, pain, and death. His mother’s death, his father’s departure—all of that was because of a similar outline, one that had arrived not too many years ago.

Some might wonder why he was running towards the danger, rather than away from it. He was only one young man, after all, the only boy in their tribe who was even close to reaching adulthood, surrounded by older women and tiny children and one unbelievably stubborn little waterbender for a sister. But when his father had left to go help in the war, he had told Sokka that the way in which he could help was to look after the village, to keep Katara and Gran-Gran safe.

That was what he’d been training himself to do all this time, why he put up with the nonsense of five-year-old boys and their potty breaks as he attempted to instill in them the importance of keeping the southern water tribe safe from future raids. He made his ice forts, he taught himself how to steer a canoe and use a spear and throw his boomerang with some measure of accuracy, because no one else was there to teach him, and always he’d had some sort of deep, subconscious hope that if ever the Fire Nation came again, he’d manage some miraculous rescue of his entire village.

He always made sure to ignore the thought that the Fire Nation was the most technologically advanced of the four nations, while he was armed with little more than some hand-me-down spears and war paint.

His lungs were beginning to burn as he sucked in the freezing air, his chest seizing up and his legs aching, but he forced himself to keep running through the snow, glad that his boots at least made it somewhat easier. His mind was spinning as he tried to keep calm. He had no weapons with him except his boomerang; the spear was, most unfortunately, left lying in the canoe. A boomerang wasn’t going to do any damage. He’d be lucky if he even managed to knock one firebender unconscious.

But he had to try.

The village was finally coming closer, the outline of both it and the ship becoming more defined. There was now a stitch in his side, but still he refused to slow down. Instead, he ran the last several yards, drawing his boomerang from its position in his belt. He could see the soldiers now, standing opposite the villagers, and he let out a high battle cry, raising the boomerang—

“Sokka, stop!”

Startled, he half-slid to a halt at the sound of his grandmother’s voice, sharper than he had ever heard it before. She sounded worried, angry, and perhaps a little scared, but as he looked closer at the scene now, his arms limp at his side, he realized that the situation really didn’t appear as bad as it could have. Gran-Gran stood resolute before the firebenders, her face grave; Sokka could tell she was intimidated only because he knew her so well, but otherwise her unease probably didn’t show to anyone else in her countenance. The other villagers’ expressions ranged from upset to terrified, but none of them seemed to be harmed. For safe measure, he performed a brief headcount. No one was missing, aside from Katara, who he now felt a twinge of guilt about leaving behind.

“But Gran…” he trailed off. He didn’t quite want to get into an explanation in front of Fire Nation soldiers about how he had promised to protect her and the entire village, and how she was now standing in the way of him and that promise.

“Sokka, be quiet,” she said sharply. She turned her face away from her grandson, focusing again on the soldiers in front of her, all of whom, Sokka now noticed, weren’t even holding any weapons.

Well, that was…odd. Not that they’d really need weapons, assuming most or all of them were probably firebenders. But it was odd, that they were here facing the village with no blatant displays of intimidation, no fear-inspiring pyrotechnics going on.

The center figure of the group—the one wearing the silliest helmet, so as to show his leadership, Sokka supposed—stepped forward. He couldn’t have been much older than Sokka himself; it was evident in the way he tapped his foot in the snow, his arms crossed, his mouth twisted into an impatient sneer. “Well?” the unknown figure asked. “Are you going to give us shelter or not?”

“Shelter?!” Sokka blurted out, unable to help himself. Katara always did say he had a big mouth. “That’s what this is about? You’re kidding, right?”

The other boy whipped around to face him, annoyed, and Sokka realized just who he was dealing with: Prince Zuko, previously heir to the Fire Nation throne, now supposedly banished by his own father. Hence the scar. Yikes.

Zuko opened his mouth to respond, but another voice cut him off, one that was both years older and far more genial.

“It is no joke, I am afraid.” The voice belonged to an older man, dressed in ceremonial Fire Nation garb but otherwise quite modest. No weapons, no armor—just a rather pronounced stomach. Somewhat against his will, Sokka had to admit that this guy looked to be the most trustworthy of the bunch. “We are not here for a raid. We would not be here at all, except that our ship is suffering from internal damages, and with this storm under way…” Here he glanced up at the heavy clouds, and the few flakes of snow now falling. Within a few hours, there was no doubt that the winds and snow alike would reach full gale. “I assure you, we come in the spirit of peace.”

Sokka bit back his own comments as Gran-Gran spoke instead. She narrowed her eyes, pointedly ignoring the friendly smile of the old man. “And if we refuse?” she asked. “How far would your peace extend, then?”

The old man seemed to take this in stride, but Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation had had enough. He let out a disdainful snort, striding forward, his entire face twisted in impatience and barely restrained fury. The side of his face featuring his scar looked particularly imposing, more disfigured and twisted than should be possible on a human face.

It appeared to take all of Zuko’s efforts not to shake Sokka’s grandmother by her shoulders. Instead, he balled his fists and snapped, “Just one night! One night of shelter, and we’ll leave again. We’re not trying to resort to violence, you old hag—”

“Zuko! That’s enough!”

For whatever reason, Zuko stopped himself at the sound of the old man’s disapproval. The guy must’ve been more important than Sokka had originally given him credit for, but there wasn’t any time to ponder it. The situation was tense enough already.

Sokka held his breath as his grandmother looked the group over. She wasn’t as afraid now, he could tell; instead, there was only hatred in her eyes. But what choice did they have? It hadn’t escaped his attention that no one had answered Gran-Gran’s question about how peaceful they’d all remain if they were denied the shelter they were seeking. He was sure their lack of response hadn’t escaped her notice, either. And even if they didn’t leave when they said they would, what could Sokka and his troop of five-year-olds ever hope to do, if these Fire Nation soldiers were peaceful as long as they were allowed to stay, and violent the moment they were questioned?

Before anyone could speak again, however, Katara appeared to have finally caught up. She was holding her side, breathing heavily, apparently not able to run as fast as Sokka for such a long period of time. She looked worried, intent on finding out what was going on, but Sokka positioned himself in front of her, attempting to block her from view. If Gran-Gran wasn’t going to let him fight off the Fire Nation, he was still going to try his best to protect his little sister, at least.

“What’s going on?” she whispered, but he only shook his head in response.

Gran-Gran seemed to think long and hard about her options, the creases around her mouth and eyes deepening after the arrival of her only granddaughter on the scene. If Katara lost her temper and attempted to waterbend at even one of these soldiers…

“Very well,” she said, and the hate in her old eyes had never been brighter.


	3. The Reveal

That night, dinner was a horrible, awkward affair.

Never in her entire life had Katara expected to dine with the Fire Lord’s own son and brother, much less in her family’s tent. The rest of the ship’s crew was dining in other tents, setting the entire village tense and on edge. Half the villagers were probably expecting to be killed in their sleep tonight. The other half most likely expected to be killed while wide awake. Since everyone was suspecting the outcome to be the same either way, she would be fairly surprised if anyone in the whole village got even a wink of sleep in tonight. If anyone so much as tried, it was likely that they would spend their night twisting and turning, immersed in fear and nightmares.

The old man, as it turned out, was the former General Iroh, attempted conqueror of the Earth Kingdom capitol, Ba Sing Se, previously an heir to the Fire Nation throne, brother now to the reigning Fire Lord, and current supervisor of the banished Prince Zuko. All of this dark and unsavory history therefore caused Katara’s mind to boggle at the fact that this same old man had insisted that he, Zuko, and the other members of their crew not use up any of the southern water tribe’s food, or impose on their (rather begrudging) generosity any more than they already were by staying for one night’s worth of shelter. They had supplies of their own on the ships, they said, which would suffice just fine for a good night’s meal; what was more, the southern water tribe village was perfectly welcome to share their food, if they wanted.

Katara had been suspicious of the old man’s kindness, and Gran-Gran, apparently sharing her suspicions, had refused his offer of food, but he still at least seemed to be sincere. And maybe just a little bit trustworthy—unlike his nephew, who appeared angry and dissatisfied with everything from the food off his own ship to the pot of stewed sea prunes burbling in the middle of the tent, to the animal skins on the tent’s walls and floor. He sat huddled in the corner, the scarred side of his face showing prominently in the firelight, looking decidedly unhappy, and even more decidedly threatening.

She watched him bitterly, growing ever more suspicious. Unlike his uncle, Prince Zuko had offered them no apologies, no additional promises of their immediate departure. Iroh thus far had attempted to strike up several small conversations—What was life like in the South Pole? What were their favorite foods? Did they enjoy tea?—to no avail, as no one else was quite in the mood to talk to members of a hated enemy nation, but at least he was trying. She could give him credit for that. But she couldn’t trust this Prince Zuko any farther than she could throw him. She wouldn’t trust him.

Her eyes narrowed as she sipped quietly at her sea prunes.

\---

It figured that, since he had been banished, Zuko’s birthdays had only gotten continually worse.

The first birthday after his birthday had been a quiet affair. The crew had pulled the ship into a Fire Nation port after Iroh had spent most of the morning convincing his young nephew that taking just one day off from his patrol duties and from hunting the Avatar wouldn’t make too much of a difference. So they’d gone into town for a birthday dinner, which had been nice enough, but the entire rest of the day Zuko had asked the ship’s captain continually if a messenger hawk had come. He’d still held out some small hope that his father might send him a letter celebrating his fourteenth birthday, maybe even a letter saying that it was time for Prince Zuko to come home.

Obviously, no such letter had ever come.

On his fifteenth birthday, Zuko had refused to let the ship stop anywhere, and pushed all the crew to take as few breaks as possible. He didn’t ask if any letters had come that time, but stayed holed up in his room most of the time, refusing to speak to the crew and his uncle alike, pushing everyone to work the patrol duties harder than ever. He had even refused dinner of any kind that night, and went to bed early, feeling both angry and sick to his stomach.

But this year took the prize for the worst birthday thus far.

The weather outside had continued to follow his mood, having now progressed to a full-out blizzard, complete with howling winds which whipped the snow down and around at speeds which stung the skin. He, his uncle, and all the crew were essentially trapped on this hunk of ice that served as a village until morning, if not even longer. The rations they’d pulled off the ship, while still no doubt better than anything these water tribe peasants could hope to offer, were undeniably stale given that it had been such a long time since they’d last gone into port. And, of course, the southern water tribe was hardly a cultural hub. Zuko wasn’t a talkative young man even in the best of times, but even he occasionally had things to discuss with the crew and Iroh; in this situation though, talking at all simply felt awkward and strained.

That didn’t seem to be stopping Uncle Iroh, though. In spite of the failed attempts at conversation he had already made, the old man was not to be discouraged. Instead, Zuko watched, trying not to look too terribly interested, as his uncle swallowed another few bites of rice, turned to the young water tribe girl, and yet again attempted to find some way of carrying on a mealtime discussion.

“Earlier, my nephew and I were discussing the astounding beauty of this place,” he said. “You seem like a young lady with an appreciation for nephew. Having grown up here, wouldn’t you agree that the South Pole is quite beautiful?”

The girl looked a little startled at being the one addressed this time. All the other questions had been directed at her grandmother, who had replied as perfunctorily as possible. She was silent a few moments, and at last seemed to judge the question as harmless. She nodded. “Uh...yeah, I guess,” she agreed.

He didn’t turn his head any farther around, but he gathered that the girl’s older brother must have shot her a glare from the other side of the tent, because she turned suddenly and defensively. “What? That’s not a personal question, and you have to admit that the South Pole is really pretty.”

Zuko couldn’t help himself; he snorted. Like she’d ever even seen any place outside the South Pole before.

If the girl’s brother had had a response in mind, she didn’t let him finish. She seemed to have been waiting for an excuse to turn on Zuko himself and snap at him. At the sound of his snort, she whipped around to face him, her face livid.

The reason he’d been paying the most attention to her was precisely because she’d been glaring at him periodically. He supposed his scar, a definite attention-grabber in social situations, was partly to blame, but regardless, he still hated the feeling of being stared at.

Apparently, she was no longer satisfied with just shooting him dirty looks, having found his derisive snort reason enough to confront him more directly. “I’m sorry, did you have something you wanted to say?” she asked, crossing her arms. Her eyes were surprisingly like the old woman’s as she looked at him with hatred so intense, it was a wonder she wasn’t a firebender herself.

He remained seated in his corner of the tent, not moving, only his eyes directly focused on her now. “Just that you don’t know what you’re talking about. This place is empty, and desolate, and worthless.” Just like its residents, he tacked on silently.

Judging by the way she leapt to her feet, she had felt the sting of his insults, both spoken and unspoken. “What? You—you have no right to insult us! After everything you’ve done, all that you’ve taken from us!”

“Taken from you?” he sneered. “I haven’t taken anything from you, except a little floor-space.”

“I meant you and the rest of the Fire Nation!” Her voice was rising in both volume and pitch; Zuko turned more to face her, his own expression more displeased than ever. The girl’s brother, still seated off to the side, looked nervous. “You and your family are to blame for everything that’s gone wrong here, in the Earth Kingdom—everywhere!”

At that, he too was on his feet. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! But then, what could I expect from a filthy peasant—?”

“Prince Zuko! Enough!” Iroh wasn’t standing, but his voice was sharper than Zuko had heard it for some time. He stared pointedly at his nephew, but Zuko wasn’t looking away from the girl now. He did, however, refrain from tacking any more insults onto the end of that sentence.

The water tribe girl looked ready to hit him, if only she could be sure of doing so without getting her hand burned off. She gritted her teeth, fuming, searching for something to say before finally blurting out, “I guess you’re just as ugly inside as you are out!”

“Get out of my face!” he snarled. He had a feeling if this conversation didn’t end soon, he was going to end up hurting her after all, no matter if his uncle tried to stop him or not.

“Get out of our tent! Get out of our village!” she retorted.

He didn’t move. Standing his ground, he glared down at her through slitted eyes. No longer did he have anything else to say to her, but he wasn’t going to run out of any tent just because some little peasant girl told him to.

She looked away when she realized he wasn’t going to back down, turning her back on the entire tent and storming out wordlessly. Zuko continued to scowl after her for a few seconds and then, upon realizing that she wasn’t immediately coming back in, took closer examination of everyone else in the tent instead. The girl’s grandmother and brother both seemed too shocked to speak, but Iroh was staring firmly at Zuko, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Prince Zuko,” he began. It took every ounce of self-restraint that Zuko had not to roll his eyes. He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “You must go after her immediately. Make amends for your rudeness.”

“My rudeness?!” he repeated, stunned. “Uncle, did you not hear her?” It was one thing for Zuko himself to speak what was on his mind; banished or not, he was royalty by birth, an inheritor of the divine right to rule. Even if he lost his temper, no mere peasant had the right to talk back to him, particularly when he and his uncle were doing them a favor in not completely annihilating what pathetic remnants were left of the southern water tribe.

“I did hear, and you are still the one to blame. Would you let her freeze to death in the storm?” Iroh said. He must have known that his nephew was very close to snapping out an affirmative to that last question, because he continued without pause. “You have committed a grave dishonor, Zuko. These people have indeed offered us their hospitality when we were in need of it. You must be the one to retrieve her!”

Never before had Zuko felt such an intense desire to strike his uncle. All the muscles of his arms tensed as he forced himself to look away, stomping out of the tent in barely contained rage.

He’d just had to mention dishonor.

\---

Her surroundings were freezing, but Katara’s anger kept her warm. She paid no mind to the winds whipping around her, nor the ache of the snow and the ice that struck her face and arms, but continued trudging through at a brisk pace. If only she had been half this angry when Sokka ran off earlier today, she probably could have caught up to him so much sooner.

It had crossed her mind briefly, at first, upon exiting the tent that she should grab her tent, but she hadn’t, for fear that someone would try and stop her from wandering off. She wanted nothing more than to be left alone, so she’d decided to leave her warmer attire behind.

Her visibility was almost entirely reduced by the blizzard. She could see no landmarks, no sign of any other tents, not even the footprints she surely must have been leaving behind in her wake. That didn’t matter, though. Not even the wind, which was so strong as to push her sideways when she was attempting to walk a straight path, bothered her, at least for the moment. Only her anger, her despise for the soldiers and the Fire Nation and Prince Zuko in particular, mattered.

How dare he? How could he? She had grown up all her life both fearing and disliking the Fire Nation, having heard the stories of the old raids, the brutal manner in which the Fire Nation had started the war. That dislike had solidified into a passionate hatred by the time her mother was killed, and she had not resigned that hatred to the one man alone that had killed her mother, but let it grow and spread for the entire nation at large. If anything, the conversation in the tent cemented her belief that these people were born evil. They raided the water tribes and the earth kingdom, they had completely eradicated the air nomads, and now they came to abuse the sense of fear felt by their victims.

She ignored her own shivering, walking on with her hateful thoughts. That stupid, spoiled prince; he didn’t even know how much strain he’d put her through, not only in biting back her comments, but in keeping from waterbending at him. She could have done it, for a moment, simply waterbended the hot water surrounding the stewed sea prunes and whipped another scar across that face of his. Only the fact that his uncle was in the tent with him had stopped her, because surely the old man’s loyalty was to his family, no matter the fake geniality he put on display. He would stop her from waterbending any further, and she was no master, anyway. If she waterbended, she’d be taken captive, ripped away from her home and family. Or worse, she’d have just been killed on the spot. Perhaps Gran-Gran and Sokka would even have been killed too, simply out of association.

So she hadn’t lashed out at the Fire Nation prince, however much she’d wanted to.

In spite of her continued anger, the cold was by this point starting to catch up with her. Her shivers became faster, her walking slowed. Maybe she should go back now, and hope the firebenders were true to their word and would leave by morning…if only she knew which way was ‘back.’

A distant sound caused her to look around, searching for its source, but she couldn’t make out anything in the freezing gale, not even the direction the sound was coming from. For all she knew, she was imagining it, or it was the sound of the howling wind, mimicking some human cry.

She kept walking, picking a direction in which she hoped she’d come from. It was harder to get solid footing here, though, so she just might have picked the wrong way. No sooner had this thought occurred to her, and she had turned around to try again, than she felt a hand latch onto her forearm, sending a chill that had nothing to do with the weather up her spine.

Katara turned, looking into the distinctly unpleasant visage of Prince Zuko yet again.

He scowled back at her, tightening his grip on her arm as though she would run at any moment. “You’re coming back with me!” he screamed. While she rather thought he was screaming because he was so angry, there was a good possibility that he was doing it because the ice storm was making it just as difficult to hear as to see.

Whatever the case, she still didn’t trust him. “Let go of me!” she yelled back, attempting to tug her arm out of his grip. He didn’t relent, keeping his fingers on her forearm like a vice. An idea occurred to her, and she suddenly relaxed, appearing to have given up on getting her arm free. “Why are you even here?” The only plausible reason she could think of was that he didn’t want to give a blizzard the pleasure of killing her, and had come out here simply to finish the job himself.

“If I had it my way, I wouldn’t be!” he shouted. “But my uncle—”

Seizing on his momentary distraction, his assumption that she was no longer making a break for it, Katara shoved hard at his chest with her free hand and yanked the other arm out of his grip, stumbling away from him. Even if he was just here to take her back to the village, she wasn’t going to walk next to him, or let him boss her around, much less let someone like him actually touch her.

He snarled, his already thin patience giving way at last, and lunged forward after her, stumbling over the ice. She continued to evade him, backing up repeatedly and keeping her arms well out of reach, but for every step she took back, he took another one forward.

And suddenly, he reached out and made contact with her mother’s necklace.

If his patience had snapped, then so had hers. She froze in her tracks, staring at him for a split second, and then the anger came barreling through, twofold what it had been earlier. “Don’t you touch that!” she screamed. And without thinking, she whipped her arm upward, taking an almost subconscious control over the fallen snow and ice so that it clustered around her, solidifying, taking shape, until it formed an icy whip. In the next second, she brought her icy whip down on his arm, hard, leaving an angry red welt behind.

To his credit, he still didn’t release her necklace, despite the pain that blow must’ve brought him. Perhaps he was just too shocked.

“A waterbender…” he breathed.

There was a wordless moment between them in which Katara feared for her life as she had never done before. This was it, the point in time at which he would either kill her, or beat her into unconsciousness so he could throw her into captivity for the rest of her life. She’d done it now, given herself away, and there was no way she could just convince him to forget what he’d seen.

She held her breath, waiting, hating every millennium that seemed to pass while he stared down at her with that triumphant gleam in his eyes.

But something went wrong. In one instant, they both took note of a deeper sound beneath the shrieks of the wind, one that seemed to originate from underneath them. In the next, before either of them could react, a sudden crack sounded through the air, and then the ice was splitting, falling away from them, and they were under the water.

Katara could swim, of course, but this was water from the South Pole in the middle of winter. It was less like water than it was frozen fire, and every inch of her seized up, suddenly unable to move and screaming with protest. Once, twice she tried to move, but her arms and legs wouldn’t respond to her. On the third try, she was finally able to move her arms again as the adrenaline in her body finally began coursing, sending a strong but temporary stream of warmth through her. She struggled to get back to the surface, but it was impossible. Something was weighing her down.

She didn’t know what it was, and she couldn’t see. Desperately, she forced her eyes open under the water, attempting to look around, but it was pitch black. Surely she couldn’t hold her breath much longer. She attempted to solve the problem by touch instead, reaching her arms down, not up. Then she felt it: a solid, immovable grip, still hanging on to the necklace around her neck.

Somehow, Zuko had retained his grip on her necklace as they’d fallen below the surface, and he was now pulling them both down. She had a feeling it wasn’t intentional; he couldn’t possibly want to kill her so badly for being a waterbender that he’d let himself drown, too. That could only mean that he’d sucked in too much water when they’d fallen, that he wasn’t thinking straight.

She reached out towards him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him as hard as she could, but the force was lessened by the water around him. The numbness was coming now, replacing the brief warmth her panic and adrenaline had brought. The air was leaking out of her, and her lungs were truly on fire now. She would have to inhale soon, but all around was water, and she wasn’t a powerful enough bender to move either it or herself…

They were still sinking, and still she couldn’t swim up to the surface…

A sudden glow lit the water.

For a moment, she thought the oxygen deprivation had gotten to her. She was dying, drifting off, and this glow was the ‘light’ so many people on their deathbeds in the village described. Then she blinked. No…no, she was still in pain. Her lungs were still aching, her brain fuzzy but not in the stages of hallucination yet. The glow was…tangible, a bright white, illuminating herself, Zuko, and the water all around them.

No…it wasn’t just illuminating Zuko. It was coming from him.

She had just an instant to take in the blurry, underwater scene of the firebender floating, suspended in the water, his eyes glowing, his hand still latched onto her necklace, refusing to give up his grip, and then they were moving, blasting upwards through the surface, still further up into the air. The water had propelled them upward, circling continuously, surrounding them from the waist down.

She gasped, both from lack of air and complete astonishment. Her eyes watered immediately. She sucked down the freezing air and it felt like a knife going in, but it was oxygen nonetheless. Through her teary eyes she chanced another glance at Zuko, barely visible through the storm and her sudden lightheadedness, but still there beside her nonetheless.

His eyes flashed brighter, and the storm stopped all at once.

Coughing, still struggling to inhale more air, Katara chanced a glance downward, and realized finally that the water was holding them twenty feet above the ice.

After what seemed an eternity, his eyes began to dim. If she hadn’t been so intent on restoring a steady breathing pattern, she might have actually feared that they’d come crashing back to the ice, or even worse, right back under the water, but even as his powers calmed, he seemed to maintain steady control until the end, guiding the water so that they came down softly in the snow. Safely back on land—so to speak, anyway—the sudden surge of power finally seemed to leave him entirely, and his head drooped against the ice as he lapsed into unconsciousness.

Katara let several more coughs wrack her entire frame, sending deep shudders through her whole body, trying to avoid looking back at him for as long as possible. When she could avoid it no longer, when she had to admit that her breathing was again back to as normal as she could get it, she finally let her gaze fall on Zuko.

Zuko, the Avatar.

Zuko, the world’s only hope.

Maybe she’d have been better off drowning after all.


	4. The Reaction

For the second time that day, Sokka found himself running as if a saber-toothed moose lion was hot on his trail.

The stunned speechlessness left in the wake of Katara’s outburst, as well as the old man insisting that his nephew be the one to go and bring her back, hadn’t lasted very long. Gran-Gran and he had exchanged one more significant look with one another, and then he had stood up, fetched his furs (Katara hadn’t grabbed hers, he noted, which only served to reinforce his long-standing opinion that she was the more infuriatingly stubborn one of the two of them) and his boomerang, and gone out into the storm to get her back. No offense to the old guy, but Sokka wasn’t going to let any firebender, much less some spoiled Fire Nation prince who had more than proven that he would like to launch Katara out of his ship’s cannon and into the middle of the ocean, be in charge of retrieving his little sister. That was an older brother’s job.

He considered grabbing a torch from one of the other tents, too, but as soon as he really got out into the heart of the storm, he was glad he chose otherwise—a torch would have been utterly pointless, completely blown out by the wind, not likely to illuminate much other than his hand in front of his face, or the ice directly beneath his feet.

He wasn’t even sure how he could find her in this blizzard. Still, now wasn’t a time for crawling back to his tent and admitting to his grandmother that he had chickened out on finding his sister. Pain in the butt though she was, he cared about her. He wasn’t going to leave her out in this ice storm if he could help it, especially not with Zuko presumably looking for her too.

That didn’t stop him from complaining about going after her, though.

He muttered under his breath as he struggled against the wind and snow, wondering why it was that his sister had to be so short-tempered. He hadn’t liked the things that snooty prince had been saying any more than she had, but he had a cool enough head on his shoulders that he had just tuned it out; the firebenders were only staying till morning, anyway. Supposedly, that is. Honestly, she was such a girl sometimes. Why couldn’t she just learn to pay more attention to food than what people around her were saying? He didn’t have any problems with that.

At first, he tried tracking her down by her footprints, but that turned up poor results: as it turned out, it was hard to see even the ground beneath his feet. The snow was blowing so hard and fast, it was coming down at a diagonal, blurring his vision almost entirely. The storm itself was swirling through the air violently, eliminating any chance of him looking up to check the stars for his direction. Even the moon wasn’t shining tonight.

Panic rose in his throat as he began to fear a bit more for Katara’s sake. If she didn’t even have her furs with her, she could literally freeze to death in this storm.

“Katara!” he screamed, raising his voice to as loud a volume as his vocal cords would permit. “Katara!” His heart thudded as his hopes plummeted; it was difficult enough for him to even hear himself over the raging winds. There was no way she would be able to hear him if she were more than a few feet away.

He kept moving after that, going forward at a flat-out run because the wind would push him too far off-course otherwise. He forced his panicked brain to keep thinking logically, refusing to consider the possibility that he would stumble upon his baby sister as a frozen icicle. Which way would she have gone? Katara was usually pretty predictable when she got herself into a temper like this. Chances were she wouldn’t have run off somewhere to hide, but she would simply have wanted to be alone. And when Katara wanted to be alone, she went straight off in the opposite direction from whatever had pissed her off.

He really, really hoped that she had gone straight ahead this time.

Running became difficult the longer he did so. His feet were beginning to go numb, and he began to stumble over them as a result. With each passing minute he felt his hopes of finding his sister before morning dwindle away. Subconsciously he knew that he should turn around now, in spite of his pride. If he didn’t soon, there wasn’t much chance that he would be able to find his way back to the village in this storm either, regardless of the fact that he was equipped with a fairly reliable and innate sense of direction.

Finally he came to a stop in the midst of the ice and snow, breathing hard. He tried to peer into the impenetrable void around him but saw nothing, heard nothing. And yet he couldn’t just give up…

Without warning, the whole storm came to a dead stop.

He blinked, sure he was imagining things. Then he rubbed his eyes, wondering if maybe he was possibly so panicked that he was imagining things. But that didn’t seem to be the case. The snow had stopped falling, the winds had calmed entirely, and when he looked up even the clouds seemed to be moving away at full speed, as though something were chasing them.

Okay…that was definitely weird. For a normal guy from the southern water tribe, he knew surprisingly a lot about science, but even he didn’t know of any scientific explanation for that. No matter, though. If it lasted, then it meant he could keep searching for Katara.

He shuffled forward again, no longer able to run but still just as determined to find her. “Katara!” he shouted, renewed desperation in his voice; the lack of the storm had made it easier, but the moon still was still little more than a sliver in the sky even without the cloud cover, making it difficult to see much of anything.

“Katara!” he tried again. “Katara, where are—you,” he finished lamely, having spotted something off in the distance. He squinted his eyes, wondering just what it was; it was too high up to possibly be his little sister…but then, it didn’t look like a bird of any kind either. The only reason he saw it at all was because it was giving off a kind of glow even from this distance. Just two little pinpricks of light were discernible from here, but they glowed with such brightness and ferocity that he was able to lock onto that as his target, at least.

Well, whatever it was, it was a start. He took a deep breath, stomped his feet in the snow in one last desperate attempt to regain some circulation, and forced himself to run despite the numbness.

He was drawing closer to it gradually, about fifty feet away, then thirty—when he drew within the last few feet, he realized what, or rather who it was. It was Zuko, twenty feet in the air at the top of a gigantic pillar of swirling, frothing water. His eyes were glowing, but the glow seemed to extend further than that somehow, in a way Sokka couldn’t quite describe, as though it were trying to illuminate his entire body, too.

But last time Sokka had checked, people didn’t glow. And firebenders didn’t waterbend.

The water was slowly diminishing in size now; the prince was coming down. And as he came down, Sokka saw that Katara was with him. He felt such a dizzying rush of relief at the sight of her looking completely unharmed that he would never in a million years admit it to her face, but he felt that the dizziness could also be attributed to his current state of utter confusion.

Instead of hitting the ground, both Zuko and Katara seemed to be let down upon it gently; Sokka wasted no more time and sprinted the last ten feet towards them, just in time to watch Zuko’s head hit the ground, and Katara lapse into a coughing fit.

“Katara!”

Obviously she hadn’t noticed him before, because she jumped slightly at the sound of his voice, looking hastily away from Zuko, at whom she seemed to have been staring. She relaxed immediately as she realized it was her brother, and attempted to stand up, but he knelt down in the snow beside her to save her the trouble. She hugged him wearily.

“What happened? Are you alright?” He pulled off his furs even as he was asking her questions, throwing them around her; she felt frozen through, but he could always scold her for that later. “I mean—” He struggled for a moment to put all his thoughts and bewilderment into words, but wound up blurting out, “Why was Zuko glowing?!”

He couldn’t make out her facial expression very well with as little light as they had to go on, but he thought she frowned. “Because he’s the Avatar.”

Sokka paused, considered the comment far too ridiculous, even by his standards, and rejected it as a joke. “Ha ha, very funny,” he deadpanned. “It was probably just…something he ate. Hey, I don’t know, maybe the food on his ship was stale. I don’t really know how firebenders react to indigestion—”

“Sokka, I’m serious! He’s the real thing!”

She sounded so conflicted, so serious, that he was forced to stop spouting his denial. Instead, he sat still and listened as she told him a condensed version of all that had occurred to her since she left the tent. He wasn’t a very good audience, shaking his head and groaning loudly at some parts, but while he could tell that he was annoying her, she was far too intent on telling him her story to complain about it.

When she finished, he stared at her skeptically. “So, you’re telling me Zuko is the next Avatar? Even though the Avatar cycle supposedly ended sixteen years ago?”

“Yeah. It just kind of…happened.”

“Wow…looks like the whole world’s pretty much doomed.”  
“Sokka!”

Even worried as he was about her, he couldn’t help but give her an exasperated roll of the eyes—not that she’d be able to see it in the dark. His sister, the optimist, even in the worst of times. It still sounded like lying, but that was just his opinion. “Yeah, well,” he continued defensively, “I guess the one thing that’s gone right so far is that you didn’t waterbend at him. I was afraid you would.”

“…Um, well, about that…” she trailed.

He smacked a hand to his forehead. “Katara!”

But instead of fetching some sort of guilty reaction out of his sister, his voice seemed to finally stir Zuko to wakefulness. Both he and Katara went still as they heard the other boy groan, then the soft crunching sound of snow as he moved his hands to push himself up. They were immobilized with anxiety and dread, expecting the young Fire Nation prince to ask them at any moment what had happened, but he only continued to sit there after that, leaving them in dreadful silence.

Perhaps he knew what had happened. Who were they to say? They’d never been in the Avatar state themselves. Sokka couldn’t quite say that he pitied the crown prince of a nation that had brought the whole world nothing but anguish and strife for the past hundred years, but he did wonder what the guy was going to do if he was aware of the crazy Avatar powers he’d just put on display.

Personally, Sokka’s first guess was that he’d go into some sort of firebender rage and kill him and Katara, not least of all because his sister had apparently gone and revealed that she was the South Pole’s last waterbender, but probably more due to the fact that finding out you were the person your entire nation was hunting and prepared to torture and kill was not pleasant news to a banished prince whose return and honor all hinged on said person’s capture.

A sudden burst of light caused both him and his sister to flinch, their eyes drawn to the flames that Zuko had brought about in the palm of one hand. If there was a moment in which he seemed most likely to kill them both, it was then. However, he didn’t seem to even consider them worth his notice. He was shaking, and not, Sokka thought, because of the cold. And before either of them could figure out anything to say to a firebender they both feared and hated, Zuko got up in front of them and stormed away through the snow, the heat from his rage melting him a path to what they suspected was the village.

They both waited a moment longer, huddled in the snow, and then Sokka pulled Katara up to her feet. “Guess we should follow him, huh?” he asked, sounding rather morose at the idea.

“Yeah.”

“Fine,” he sighed, and he wondered how a simple young warrior-to-be from the southern water tribe like himself had gotten into this mess.

\---

A whirlwind. The airbenders had been dead for ages, but still Prince Zuko felt like a whirlwind right this moment, as he traversed the ice and snow back to the village, now able to use his fire to guide him since the storm had abated. No, since he had singlehandedly stopped the storm. All the thoughts, the confusion, the building rage that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, confront at the moment, were swirling around inside him, constantly gaining power. They twisted and turned and seethed and for all the moment he would have sworn he felt like an airbender creating some sort of monstrous tornado, although the tornado was inside him in this case.

And, well, it seemed there was a reason for that. He was the Avatar. Preposterous, impossible though it was, airbender blood was somewhere in there, running through his veins.

Him, the Avatar. However ridiculous or unbelievable those water tribe peasants might have found it, he could guarantee them that he felt it was a hundred times more so. Not only was it ridiculous, but it was unfair. Horrifically unfair. He tried to cling to some desperate hope that it was untrue. He could think of no other Avatar in history in this situation, not only persecuted by his or her own nation, but a member of the royal family from that same nation. Certainly, neither his father, nor his uncle, nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather, all of whom had spent their fair share of time chasing down the Avatar’s past incarnations, had dealt with this. It simply couldn’t be true. It was too impossible to believe.

And yet, he had seen himself. The moment it became apparent that he was going to die, drowning under that impenetrable hunk of ice with no one the wiser, something had snapped inside him, some sort of current of untapped energy that he had hitherto had no knowledge of whatsoever. And with that snap, he’d traveled…outside himself, somehow, and witnessed as though from a distance the way he’d shot up twenty feet into the air, the way he’d maintained a steady column of water beneath him, the way his eyes had glowed so brightly and so eerily.

In the end, it didn’t matter how much he wished that the whole thing had been some sort of hallucination brought about perhaps by him slipping on the ice and cracking his head; he had known what he’d seen must be real the moment he’d woken up, because by any other reasoning, he and the water tribe girl should have both been dead. The near-drowning, at least, he couldn’t pass off as a dream.

Besides, how else could a firebender ever waterbend without being the Avatar?

Upon first coming back to consciousness he’d had absolutely no idea what to do, or where to go. He couldn’t tell anyone, he couldn’t go anywhere. Not here or the Earth Kingdom, where he was a sworn enemy for his heritage. Not home, where he was now a sworn enemy by some cruel circumstance. All this was what he’d considered as he had sat in the snow silently in front of those peasants, trying not to feel anything, not to think, not to react, because the rage he had felt at that time would surely have overtaken him if he had indulged in it even a little bit. Yeah, like he needed another reminder in his life about how much more control everyone else around them had over their bending and their emotions.

Still, something, some buried thought, had pounded furiously in his head from the moment he’d woken up, leaving him with the overwhelming feeling that he was forgetting something important. He had tried to think what it might have been for a few seconds, but gave up, finally allowing himself to sulk rather childishly before the true anger he was feeling really set in, thinking that this really was, as he’d suspected, the worst birthday he’d ever suffered through.

Birthday…birthday…that word had then suddenly triggered what he’d been trying to remind himself of: his uncle’s voice, calm and omniscient as ever, earlier that day.

“You know, destiny is a funny thing, Prince Zuko. Perhaps this birthday of yours will bring more changes than you think.”

And perhaps after what had just happened tonight, Zuko was not thinking clearly, calmly, or efficiently, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. With the memory of his uncle’s words, so seemingly taunting in hindsight, he could form one thought only: his uncle had known.

After that thought, of course, was the point at which he’d lit his fire, struggled to his feet, and trudged off, the two water tribe peasants already forgotten in favor of more pressing thoughts and needs. His sense of direction wasn’t impeccable, of course, but it was keen enough after three years at sea, and in the calmness left after the storm, he made progress much faster. Soon, the village was within his sight.

He stormed through the tent, his anger leaking through the cracks now, and spat out, “You knew!”

Uncle Iroh looked up, appearing mildly worried but not surprised, his lips halfway to the rim of a hot cup of tea. By contrast, the old woman had startled violently when Zuko had entered the tent, and she set down the last of her bowl of sea prunes hastily, most likely for fear of spilling them. The fact that he had returned without either one of her grandchildren caused the wrinkles in her old face to tighten with renewed worry and fear, but the look on Zuko’s face must have been even more terrifying, because she said nothing to him, not a single question.

The look on his face must have alerted his uncle that something was horribly awry too, because Iroh actually set down the cup of tea and frowned. “You are going to have to be more specific, Prince Zuko,” he said apologetically. “I know many things, and some things I know almost nothing about, so—”

“You knew,” Zuko snarled, “that I’m the Avatar!”

Dead silence. Zuko still stood in the tent’s doorway, oblivious to the fact that the two water tribe peasants he’d left in the snow had followed him back to the village and were now both standing behind him, huddled together, looking from him to his uncle in a state of minor shock. But all Zuko felt was another pang of betrayal through his chest; his uncle, his mentor of the past three years, one of his idols since even before then, had known this all along and hadn’t told him.

“How long? How long have you known?” he demanded.

“…Since the day you were born,” Iroh conceded, his head bowed.

Zuko stared at the man disbelievingly. Sixteen years. His uncle had known all these long, torturous, sixteen years and hadn’t said a word.

And what good would saying something have done, hissed a small, unbiased part of his mind, besides making you angry? You wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

Zuko ignored the small voice; his anger seemed to push it away for him. “How? How could you possibly have known, the laziest man in the Fire Nation, the man who gave up on conquering Ba Sing Se so he could sit around drinking tea and playing pai sho?” he sneered.

His uncle, as though unfazed by the harsh comments, picked back up his cup of tea and shrugged, looking him in the eye now. “It is a long story,” he said.

“Tell me, then. Every detail.” Zuko wanted to threaten the man, to shake him, to tell him that if he didn’t hear the truth, he’d kill him, but something held him back. As much as he hated that calm, unflinching face right now, he wasn’t sure he hated him enough to kill him. But he perhaps hated him enough that giving him, say, a scar on the face didn’t sound so bad. And yet he still held back, for reasons unknown to him.

Iroh’s gaze was unreadable for a long moment as he sipped quietly at his tea. Zuko didn’t look away, but he saw the two water tribe peasants behind him at last out of the corner of his eye; they were creeping around him to take a seat nearer their grandmother. All three of them still looked more than intrigued to hear what his uncle had to say, though, and Zuko wasn’t sure he had even the energy to kick them out of the tent while it happened.

Besides, that waterbender girl had already seen everything anyway. And he’d seen her waterbend, though that counted for almost nothing now. Calling her out on being a waterbender when he himself was the Avatar was almost laughable, but he’d never felt less like laughing.

After a few more silent moments, Iroh nodded almost imperceptibly. “Very well,” he said. “It is a rather long tale, but I admit that it is time you learned.”


	5. Iroh's Secret

“It is difficult to know where to start, my nephew, but I will try. I suppose everything began after the death of the last fully realized Avatar, Avatar Roku—who was, as you know, from the Fire Nation, much like yourself.”

“So what? Roku was a traitor. Great-grandfather Sozin asked him to help spread our nation’s glory to the rest of the world and he refused. Then he attacked Sozin and threatened to kill him.”

Zuko had finally consented to sit down for the telling of all his uncle’s secrets, knowing better than anyone else in the tent that his uncle could make a story last for hours at a time. He was tired, besides; the exhaustion from having gone out into the storm and awakening his Avatar State was catching up with him in spite of all his anger, and he might as well sit because standing up just to glare at Iroh wasn’t going to do him any good anyway. He had planned not to interrupt his uncle initially, wanting to catch every detail possible, but found he was already breaking his internal vow because he was simply too opinionated. He didn’t want his uncle to compare him to Avatar Roku. Avatar Roku had been the Fire Nation’s biggest threat at the time, a complete traitor who served as the prime reason why the Avatars since had still been considered threats and had been tirelessly, ruthlessly hunted down.

He was the reason Zuko himself now could never go home. Before Avatar Roku, Zuko’s banishment might have been a surmountable obstacle, Avatar or not. Now, he would be seen as an enemy no matter what, a threat to the whole nation. Zuko hated the man even though he’d never met him, because his traitorous deeds had now branded Zuko a traitor of the same kind, although he’d never done anything remotely traitorous in his life aside from speaking out against one general’s crazy, thankless plan in his father’s war room, long ago.

But Iroh didn’t seem to mind the fact that he had already interrupted. In fact, his uncle simply looked at him sadly—he would even dare to say pityingly—for a moment or two, and then continued. “There is more to Roku’s story than you are aware of, Prince Zuko, and it does relate to you. But we can perhaps discuss that…another time.”

Zuko scowled. He had had enough of secrets being kept from him, of details being held back, but he held his tongue, not for his uncle’s sake, but because he wasn’t sure how many unpleasant revelations he could stand to hear in one day. How much more could he take before he broke down entirely? His uncle was right; a separate story could wait. But if he thought that Zuko would forget about it entirely and let it drop, he was wrong.

“Avatar Roku died shortly before the arrival of Sozin’s comet,” Iroh continued, “giving your great-grandfather Sozin some time to plan the progression of the war. While Roku was alive, Sozin took only a few colonies from the Earth Kingdom before he was stopped. But Roku’s death meant fewer obstacles than ever before stood in the way of the Fire Nation conquering the entire world.

Your great-grandfather and his war advisors set their sights on the Air Nomads, knowing that the Avatar would next incarnate there in the Avatar cycle. But they could not attack immediately, you see, for the nomads had distanced themselves from the rest of the world, seeking shelter in the most secluded mountains in existence. Nor were the Air Nomads unaware of the Fire Nation’s eagerness for war, though I think they may have underestimated how deep it ran.

In any case, the Fire Nation chose not to attack any of the air temples for twelve years. Most people were unaware as to why, besides the difficulty involved in reaching the temples themselves, but Sozin himself studied the night skies often, and it is rumored that he had access to knowledge from an unknown source, and he knew the date of the comet’s arrival, and what power it would lend to our people.

Your airbender incarnate, a girl by the name of Hui-ying, lived during these twelve anxious years, born at the moment that Roku departed this life. The monks of the air temples knew within the first year of her birth that she was the Avatar. There at the air temples, the airbenders had a tradition by which to pick out the Avatar that the Fire Nation has never adopted. Since all the airbenders lived as monks, they were able to test every child born into the monastery for certain signs, providing thousands of toys to choose from in their infancy. Should a child ever choose the four toys possessed by past Avatars, each from one of the different nations, the monks know then that that child is the new Avatar. But they never told her. For most of her life, she never knew she was the Avatar; the other nomads thought her too young, even with her unnatural prowess for airbending, and believed her entry into the war could wait a few more years.

But the Fire Nation invaded sooner than expected, when Hui-ying was barely twelve. She hailed from the western air temple, but even had she been from one of the other temples it would not have helped her. Sozin had stationed as many Fire Nation troops as he could within range of the air temples for months in advance, letting them test their new technology to find ways to infiltrate the temples.

On the day of the comet’s arrival, your great-grandfather launched the largest attack in Fire Nation history.

The only reason anyone knows for certain that Hui-ying was the Avatar is because the soldiers cornered the monks, heard them trying to tell the girl in their final moments of her powers. Perhaps they hoped that she could somehow trigger her Avatar state and save them all, though those hopes must have been slim. But it was all too sudden, too much, too soon. The girl knew only airbending, and even the greatest masters around her didn’t stand a chance against the firebenders, whose powers were amplified a hundredfold by Sozin’s comet.

The soldiers cared not that she was a child because their orders had been to kill every airbender possible. No other way was known to prevent the Avatar cycle than to kill off an entire nation, thus stopping the cycle from repeating in the end. So they killed Hui-ying and every other airbender present at the temples, and then they left and reported the news to their superiors. The only thing remaining, it seemed, was to kill the next three Avatars as quickly as possible so the Avatar cycle would be finished.”

Here Uncle Iroh finally took a break in his story, examining Zuko carefully, calmly, trying to see what effect this was having on his nephew. But Zuko couldn’t bring himself to feel much of anything, besides that always-present anger. He knew most of this already—maybe he hadn’t known the age of the girl, but everyone knew the attack on the airbenders had been swift and decisive. There wasn’t supposed to be any mercy in war. Some sacrifices always had to be made, no matter what side you were on.

Not knowing about being the Avatar, though…well, Zuko supposed he could relate to that, at least.

He glanced back behind him, suddenly aware again of the feeling of eyes watching him incessantly. The three water tribe peasants were still there—he’d already almost forgotten about them in the course of his uncle’s story. Again, he considered if he should try and rouse himself enough to kick them out of the tent. If this was going to get into personal details about the Fire Nation or his uncle’s life, then it was really none of their business. Then again, it was their tent. Guess that meant they could stay.

When he looked back at his uncle, Iroh was holding an outstretched cup of tea his way. “I thought you might like some before I continued, Prince Zuko,” he said.

Zuko stared long and hard at the tea, fighting down the urge to knock it out of his uncle’s hand. He didn’t want tea, he didn’t want any of his uncle’s stupid, calming rituals. He wanted to know the facts that had been kept from him for sixteen years. Only the truth was going to be able to take his mind off of his anguish at the thought that he was now more permanently unwelcome at home than ever. “Just finish your story,” he grumbled, looking away again.

So Iroh continued.

“The Fire Nation knew that the next Avatar would hail from a water tribe, and launched attacks on both. The southern water tribe was never as well-protected as the first, even in its prime…and I am afraid that all the southern waterbenders were rounded up as quickly as possible. Without the power from the comet, the Fire Nation was content to capture, not kill, most of the waterbenders—they supposed that with all the airbenders wiped out, there was no reason to kill all their other opponents. It is…to my deepest regret that we crippled the southern water tribe in such a way,” he said humbly, turning to bow his head towards the three members of the southern water tribe among them.

Zuko watched the girl he now knew to be a southern waterbender very carefully, and could see the anxiety in her and her brother’s eyes, but he chose not to say anything to his uncle. Not yet, anyway.

“When it became apparent that the next Avatar was not among the southern waterbenders, the northern water tribe was targeted next. They possessed a powerful naval fleet at the time, however, one that was nearly impenetrable, and your great-grandfather turned his life instead towards attempting to break through to the north and locate the Avatar.

Your great-grandfather Sozin lived an unnaturally long life, and when his son—your grandfather Azulon—came of age, he helped him in his search for the Avatar. Your father and I were already young boys by the time this occurred, for Sozin’s reign was much longer than Azulon’s twenty-three years. As the northern water tribe’s strongholds held out, the search intensified—years and years passed, you see, and while the water tribes have never used the airbenders’ methods for determining the next Avatar, they have methods of their own. The spirits grace the waterbenders with visions more than they do any other nation, since the waterbenders have great ties to the moon and ocean spirits themselves. With every day that passed, the likelihood increased that the waterbenders had discovered the next Avatar and would tell him or her of their destiny as soon as possible, so as to avoid a repeat of what had happened to the last Avatar.

As my father became increasingly immersed in his duties as Crown Prince, he sent others in his stead to continue the siege of the north. The waterbenders could not hold out forever, and so long as we damaged their fleets, it mattered not if we captured all of them, he said.

And so he chose me, his oldest son, and several of his most trusted generals, to lead an invasion force, as soon as the word returned that the northern fleet had been sufficiently crippled to allow for a journey into the heart of the North Pole. I was still too young to lead in anything but name; I was expected to watch and learn so that I could lead the hunt for the next Avatar, when they were born into the earthbending cycle.

The invasion didn’t take long, because our goal was one person only. We found the next Avatar more easily than expected, and indeed, by the time we found him, he was well over sixteen, and aware of his status as the Avatar. He was a young man by the name of Haku, skilled naturally at waterbending and trained in some earthbending—only minor, as you can imagine, since the North Pole is just as icy as the South Pole—as well, thanks to a tutor from the Earth Kingdom who had snuck into the northern water tribe more easily than all the naval forces of the Fire Nation had broken through. Haku was much like yourself, my nephew, quite headstrong, fearless, and determined. Although he knew nothing of firebending or airbending, he insisted with the other waterbenders that he be allowed to defend his tribe. And when it became clear that his tribe would not be eliminated as the airbenders had been, so long as he came quietly, he ceased fighting and let our forces capture him.

I am ashamed to say that our people repaid his honorable deed most unjustly.

Since he came quietly, in the end, my grandfather Sozin decided not to kill him right away, as had been the case with the airbender. Avatar Haku was taken prisoner instead, placed into isolation away from the southern waterbenders and Earth Kingdom prisoners. He was kept there for…many years. I recall this clearly because I was often sent by my father to check in at the prison. I came to be sickened by what I saw, but I said nothing—to my regret. I did not want to anger my family.

In isolation, Haku was most gravely mistreated. Fed only the worst scraps of food, insulted…I think the guards might have tortured him if only they could have been sure of not provoking him into the Avatar state. Either way, it was a horrible existence, and it lasted for nearly forty years.

Then came the day when Haku turned sixty, and my grandfather decided he had done his duty in keeping Haku as prisoner for a time. He ordered the death of Avatar Haku, a deed carried out most viciously, most shamefully. My loyalty to my country never wavered, but it was then, I think, that I first sought a way out of having to kill the Avatar. I could not condone it in my mind.”

And Iroh paused again, a break that no one seemed to want this time because the entire tent was filled with listeners baiting their breath. Zuko himself was becoming more caught up in his uncle’s story than he would have liked to admit, forgetting sometimes even how angry with his uncle he was. This part of the story had touched a little too close to home for comfort, and he had a feeling that his uncle knew it.

Zuko knew very much what it was like to object to the plans of your nation without meaning it as a traitorous offense. He himself bore his scar and his banishment as a result of speaking out against what he had seen as one general’s horrifying plan to put new Fire Nation troops out on the front lines as cannon fodder. But simply because he had disagreed with the general had never meant that he didn’t love his country, or his father. It didn’t matter. That was how he’d been treated, in the end.

He had been sitting cross-legged thus far, but he found he had nothing to say, no bitter remarks or snide comments to his uncle, so he uncrossed his legs, only to bring his knees up under his chin. He sat in sullen silence, unwilling to comment.

To his surprise, someone else commented for him—the waterbender girl.

“So…what happened next?” she asked, apparently in spite of herself.

Though she had continued sending him looks of mingled fear and resentment this entire time, Zuko could tell that she didn’t distrust Uncle Iroh half so much. Of course. Only people from the Fire Nation would consider his uncle to be shallow or distrustful for his legendary defeat at Ba Sing Se; everyone else from the other nations most likely considered him a kind of secret hero. He glared at the girl, wondering if she was really so pressed for details from other people’s lives. He could have made another quip then, about how life must be even more boring in the South Pole than he’d thought if this was what she resorted to, but considering her reaction to his last (entirely truthful) comment, he thought it better to keep quiet.

Iroh didn’t seem to mind her tentative entrance into the conversation. Instead he turned his gaze on her and gave her a small, albeit melancholy smile, as though what Zuko saw as her pretentiousness, he saw as charm. “Next,” he said, “came the busy times.

Fire Lord Sozin passed away two years after the death of Haku, leaving the throne open to my father, Azulon. I was deemed the new Crown Prince and put under more rigorous training than ever before. I was also put in charge of capturing the new Avatar, a more daunting task perhaps than the previous ones, not only because of my newfound resolution to not kill the Avatar at all, but because the Earth Kingdom is broader and more diverse than either the water tribes or the air temples. I went away on frequent journeys as often as I could get away with, in attempts to clear my mind.

During the next few years, when I was not gathering what information I could on whether the Earth Kingdom had identified its next Avatar yet, I was attempting to broaden my views. I became interested in spirit lore—you may have heard of my trip to the spirit world, my nephew. Indeed, that trip occurred in the midst of those busy years, and I learned many things from it, things both about the Avatar and the state of our nation.

And not long after my journey into the spirit world, news came that the Avatar had been discovered in a tiny, rural Earth Kingdom village, a few years sooner than we expected.

You see, Prince Zuko, we knew of no way in which the Earth Kingdom normally identifies its Avatars. Its lands are so vast, its people so numerous and different, that it would be impossible for every child to be tested the way they were in the Air Nomads’ temples. Most of the time, an Avatar will discover the truth about themselves when they turn sixteen. In the air temples, the monks would tell them on their sixteenth birthday, in the water tribes, the priests would tell them, and of course, in the Fire Nation the answer is usually divined by the Fire Sages by then and also told to the Avatar in question on his or her sixteenth birthday.

If the Avatar is not told voluntarily by any persons surrounding them, they discover it for themselves in one way or another…such was the case with you tonight, Prince Zuko. I know you are angry that I did not tell you, but know that I only feared you would think me a liar, and I knew that you would eventually discover it in one way or another tonight, as fate would have it.

The Earth Kingdom uses this natural discovery of the Avatar because of its vastness; it saves worrying and searching, in most cases. We were surprised, therefore, because the Avatar in question was yet again only twelve years old when she discovered her destiny. When we went to the village in question, we heard she had fled. My soldiers demanded all the information that they could, and found that the girl had been triggered into the Avatar state earlier than expected, for ordinarily the Avatar state is only triggered when one is in life threatening danger, a situation that never occurs for most civilians in the heart of the Earth Kingdom, far from the conflict with our nation at its outer edges.

But a landslide had begun, threatening to wipe out her and everyone else in her tiny mountainside village, and the girl, Bao-yu, accidentally triggered her powers, and all the memories of her past lives.

She was difficult to track from there, but somehow we managed. She was little more than a scared twelve-year-old girl who had stumbled into her power too early; her terrified appearance made an impression on any villagers who saw her elsewhere, so she stuck to the wild as much as possible. Still, we found her in less than a year.

Young though she was, she was smart. She attempted to flee through the cave of tunnels that leads to the great city of Omashu, knowing well the uneasy rumors that existed of the cave’s curse. My soldiers refused to follow her in after there, convinced they would meet early deaths. And I, seeking a chance to speak to the girl away from prying eyes and ears, seized my chance—I followed her into the labyrinth.

However, she had not gone into the cave to escape to Omashu, as I had originally thought. When I finally caught up to Bao-yu, it was to see her, illuminated by my firelight, with a boulder hanging over her own head. I wondered then if she would attack me, thinking me her enemy, but she was determined only that I not try to stop her.

I asked her why she would want to kill herself. When she wouldn’t speak to me, I told her of my conviction that the Avatar was no enemy of the Fire Nation. I offered to teach her firebending in secret if only she would refrain from killing herself. I do not know whether she believed me or not, but my offer got her to speak at last. She told me she could not stand the pressure of being the Avatar. At only twelve years old, she had triggered too many memories too fast; she had seen all the pain and suffering brought upon her past two incarnations and feared what would happen to her if she followed in their footsteps. She wanted to kill off the Avatar cycle, she said, and end the pain and suffering felt by future Avatars. She hoped that she could somehow again trigger her Avatar state, and that she could crush herself to death then, forever breaking the cycle.

Had I not already visited the spirit world by then, I might have doubted her words that the cycle could be broken in such a way. But I knew she was telling the truth, and I pleaded with her to do otherwise, told her that the world would be saddened at her death. We stood alone in that cave for a long time.

In the end, I failed to change her mind, save for one, small concession—she decided not to trigger her Avatar state. It didn’t matter, she said, the cycle would still end when it reached the airbenders again, so she would only be allowing one more person to suffer after her. She would not let me reach her. Every time I tried to approach without violent means, she would earthbend herself deeper into the cave’s clutches, that boulder lingering over her all the time. I hoped to tackle her out of the way when at last she let it drop, but…I was too late. Bao-yu took her own life out of fear and desperation that no child should ever have to endure.

I was distraught. I stayed two hours longer in the cave, trying futilely to retrieve her body from that blanket of rubble. In the end, I succeeded in that much, but not without expending a great deal of energy and bloodying my hands. I wandered around the cave the remainder of the time, unsure of the way back, not particularly caring if I made it back. Somehow, I came across a light in that tunnel other than my own fire, natural lights that illuminated the cave from its ceiling and led me back to where I had started from.

My soldiers were curious as to whether the girl had actually made it to Omashu, or whether the cave had swallowed her whole. I wanted then to protect the next Avatar, born into our own nation, but knew that if I told them anything of Bao-yu’s original plan to kill herself in the Avatar state, they would use that information when the next Avatar revealed him or herself, and all would be lost. I told them instead that I had killed the girl an hour beforehand, after a long chase, and they believed me, for they thought of her as a small girl only capable of some decent earthbending and little more. I was celebrated as a hero, asked to come home for something of a break period for my good deed.

I cannot deny that I was exhausted, sickened with the world and myself. A rest period at home would do me well, I thought, and it could do me no harm to stay close to the Fire Nation, where I knew the Avatar would be born again.

My nephew, you want to know how I have known all these years that you were the Avatar. I know because the day I returned to the Fire Lord’s palace, some weeks later, I was greeted by my brother’s wife, your mother Ursa. She was pleased to see me return in one piece, she said, but scolded me for looking tired. And she told me then that she had just had a child, a firstborn son…you. I was happy for her; I asked out of curiosity when you had been born. She told me a time that coincided, not with the time I had told my soldiers that I had killed Bao-yu, but the time at which I knew the girl had killed herself. I knew then, and my own instinct reconfirmed it when I went with your mother to look at you.”

“Did my mother know?” Zuko blurted out, before he could help himself. He was undeniably sickened by his uncle’s story at this point, both in the ways it applied to him and what it spoke about his nation. The hate in the eyes of all these water tribe members made a little more sense now, and yet he hated them for having good cause to hate him in return. “Did she know? Is that why she left?”

Iroh shook his head, but Zuko wasn’t sure what to believe.

“I never told your mother. I could not make her worry as I began to worry in that moment. I had good cause to fear what would happen to you, were it ever discovered—simply because of the time I had given to my soldiers, off by only one hour from the time Bao-yu actually died, another boy in the Fire Nation had been taken away from his mother, to be observed for signs of being the Avatar. I trusted your mother, Prince Zuko, but I did not want her to fear for you.

Your sister was born two years afterwards, and I know of all the grief she has caused you, but at the time, her birth was useful. She was a natural firebending prodigy; her displays of talent appeared to outshine you. Most Avatars are prodigies themselves in their natural element; if you wonder why such was not the case with you, it is because the nature of firebending has become corrupted in these past hundred years. Now it draws off of anger and hate where it did not before, and you were never a child as capable of such emotions as your sister was. I could have taught you more proper ways to firebend in your youth, but again, I refrained from doing so because I believed it would only draw too much attention to your skills.

And then the perfect opportunity to train you came, I am sorry to say, in your thirteenth year, after your banishment was declared. I had had to spend time away from you during other points in the war, like my siege on Ba Sing Se, but I knew then I could serve as your own personal firebending instructor, and that I could be there when your sixteenth birthday arrived…

Perhaps I have made many mistakes, Prince Zuko. But I had your best interests at heart. I wanted only to protect you.”

The tent and all its residents sat in complete silence as the weight of Iroh’s secrets fell over them like a fog.


End file.
